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Purple Pain

Rob Burns / AP, Getty

Matthew Miles Goodrich | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,837 words)

 

I came to inside a CAT scan machine. Not a revelation  — I didn’t spring up and bang my bruised face against the cool metal of the medical marvel  —  but a recognition, a lugubrious return to my cognizance. I surmised I was in a hospital and, broken bones considered, that was a good place to be.

At least my trauma had a sense of humor. I couldn’t remember where I had been before landing inside the CAT scan machine, but I could tell you the song that had been rattling around my concussed head. It was Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

Inside the giant X-ray assessing the damage, I became aware that I was humming along to the song’s rhythmic chug. As the fog of my brain injury lifted, cueing the sharpening of the prickly sensations upon my skull, I eked the lyrics out of my memory: “Never meant to cause you any sorrow / never meant to cause you any pain.”

***

I cried the first time I heard “Purple Rain.” (This puts Prince in a broad category of musicians that runs the gamut from Television to Miles Davis to Taylor Swift.) It’s not only, in my opinion, Prince’s best song — a tough contest, to be sure, considering “Little Red Corvette” — but also one of the best songs ever written. That’s a rare achievement for a ballad, a genre whose slow-burning schmaltz tends to yank at the heartstrings rather than soar for the stars. “Purple Rain” does both, thanks to Prince’s lilting lyrics, addressing a hurt and harmed “you,” and that teasing, probing, undulating guitar solo. Prince carries us with him along every bent note, with the ebb and flow of a prom-night sway. “Purple Rain” is sad, tender, and triumphant, the sound of the most painful part of any relationship: the letting go.

“Purple Rain” is a letting go.

Price died on April 21, 2016, the same day I turned 23. He achieved a rare ubiquity in my adolescence: His iconography was everywhere and his music was nowhere. I knew he was once the “Artist Formerly Known As Prince,” the only satisfying pronunciation of the unpronounceable symbol that he performed under for a spate in the ’90s. His stare on the cover of “Purple Rain” — which has him festooned like some courtier draped around a fanged motorcycle as mist threatens to envelop him — told me everything I needed to know. Just as his career was fraught with disputes with record labels, making for spotty access to his albums in the post-Napster era, Prince’s stare was a diva’s: pouty, churlish, provocative, longing, damaged.

My first exposure to Prince came in high school. It was around the time I started playing guitar. Looking for a hero, I found a 2004 video of him, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, and others paying tribute to George Harrison at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, trading verses of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The version of the video I saw promised “the BEST guitar solo in music history.”

Prince’s histrionics begin after the final verse, his solo coloring the A minor chord with a chromatic descent. He takes a few bars, then a few more, barrelling over Petty’s attempts to steer the group back to the chorus. With his shirt unbuttoned to his midriff, Prince kneads the frets, thrusting the guitar into his groin and wielding its neck like a phallus. With each elongated note and ecstatic contortion of his lips, he scales a new climax, thrusting and weaving and longing. The panache with which he falls onto a cameraman only to rise again, still playing, would have been unworkable from any less of a showman, but Prince sells it with orgasmic euphoria. Harrison’s son beams at Prince from onstage. The band finishes. Prince tosses his instrument. The camera zooms out. The guitar goes up. It doesn’t come down.

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Earth to Gwyneth Paltrow

MIAMI, FL - DECEMBER 15: Gwyneth Paltrow at her book signing at Goop Pop Up at Miami Design District on December 15, 2017 in Miami, Florida. (AP Images) People: Gwyneth Paltrow/IPX

At the New York Times Magazine, Taffy Brodesser-Akner reports on Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness empire, which started off as a newsletter where G.P. (as she’s known) simply recommended things she liked. Fast forward a few years. Now Goop is a huge brand: a clothing-and-beauty-company-slash-publishing house with a magazine, a website, and a newsletter, all estimated to be worth $250 million from flogging new-age products for eliminating wrinkles and flab while improving your sex life. But the truth is catching up to Goop; it’s been investigated by the Council of Better Business Bureaus and TruthInAdvertising.org for deceptive marketing claims, forcing Goop to attempt to embrace science and facts across the empire as a “growing pain.”

By the time she stood in that Harvard classroom, Goop was a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information, and soon it would become a TV-show producer. It was a clearinghouse of alternative health claims, sex-and-intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There was no part of the self that Goop didn’t aim to serve.

G.P. didn’t want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $795 G. Label trench coat and the $1,505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market? Goop’s ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; finding beautiful things was sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but a lack of that privilege didn’t mean you shouldn’t have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford it doesn’t mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.

The newsletter was at first kind of mainstream New Age-forward. It had some kooky stuff in it, but nothing totally outrageous. It was concerned with basic wellness causes, like detoxes and cleanses and meditation. It wasn’t until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking: advice from psychotherapists and advice from doctors about how much Vitamin D to take (answer: a lot! Too much!) and vitamins for sale and body brushing and dieting and the afterlife and crystals and I swear to God something called Psychic Vampire Repellent, which is a “sprayable elixir” that uses “gem healing” to something something “bad vibes.”

The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And then, of course, the more Goop was criticized: by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous — no, now it was dangerous. And elsewhere people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all that did was bring more people to the site — among them those who had similar kinds of questions and couldn’t find help in mainstream medicine.

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The Contradictions of Twitter’s ‘We Care’ Campaign

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 8 minutes (1,917 words)

Last week, James Woods, an actor who supports Trump and delights in right-wing memes, tweeted a photo of a woman at a rally. The woman wore a yellow placard that read “My Legs Are Open For Refugees.” Woods, amused and apparently unimpressed by the woman’s appearance, wrote, “Finally, a real solution to stop illegal immigration.” The photo was fake. The words “Legs Are” were, clearly—and quite poorly—edited into the image. That didn’t stop Woods from sharing the photo, which was retweeted more than 7,400 times and picked up by Nigel Farage, a prominent member of the UK Independence Party, and popular pro-Trump accounts. For a certain faction of right-wing Twitter users, the image was another piece of evidence validating a noxious truth.

Eventually, a photographer named Lasia Kretzel saw the picture. Kretzel was disturbed; she had taken the original photograph, in which the sign read, “My Door Is Open for Refugees.” The sign also had a stamp from Amnesty International that had been removed in some edits. Kretzel had captured the image more than two years ago, at a demonstration supporting Syrian refugees in Saskatoon, Canada. In a series of tweets, she laid out how it had been altered as a piece of propaganda designed to whip up anti-refugee sentiment. Her thread was retweeted more than 6,400 times. Soon, Farage deleted his wrongful tweet. But the Woods post remained up, zooming past Kretzel’s in popularity. It’s likely that few, if any, of his followers ever noticed the correction. Besides, even if the tweet was untrue, it was still a good troll, and it showed his fans what they wanted to see.  Read more…

Leaving a Good Man Is Hard To Do

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kelli María Korducki | Excerpt adapted from Hard To Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,558 words)

Several years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the prolonged and heart-wrenching breakup that persisted in destroying my entire life over the course of many months, a friend sent me an essay she thought I should read. She was also in the middle of a breakup — a divorce — and we had met a few years earlier through the partners we were simultaneously losing. As one terrible summer faded into an even bleaker fall, we became Gchat pen pals in an ongoing correspondence of mutual despair.

I was officially single and deeply ashamed. To me, my breakup had constituted a karmic injustice that I could have stopped — against my wonderful former partner, against our respective families, and against the scores of women throughout history who’d been denied the love and respect of a Good Man. My friend told me she looked at this must-read piece from time to time, whenever she was feeling scared about the future. I still wasn’t sure that I might have one.

Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.
Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.
Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.
Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.
Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though there is nowhere to go.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.

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The Rub of Rough Sex

iStock/Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chelsea G. Summers | Longreads | July 2018 | 15 minutes (3,801 words)

 
This is a piece about abuse. This is a piece about kink and a piece about consent. This is a piece about the law. This is a piece about some powerful men whom I’ve never met, and it’s a piece about some nobody men whom I’ve loved. This is a piece about rough sex, about “rough sex,” and about how these two categories overlap and rub each other raw. This is a piece that was hard for me to write and may be hard for you to read. Most of all, this is a piece about why masculinity is fractured, and how women get caught in its cracks.

***

On May 7 of this year, The New Yorker dropped its Eric Schneiderman bombshell. The article, cowritten by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, gives voice to four women who detail their experiences with Schneiderman, the New York attorney general at the time, and accuse him of repeated instances of “nonconsensual physical violence.” Presented as a thread in the unfolding #MeToo fabric of sexual abuse allegations, this New Yorker piece told four women’s stories of how Schneiderman slapped and choked them, “frequently in bed and never with their consent.” Within a day, Schneiderman had resigned his office.

I read the Mayer and Farrow piece with a mounting sense of dread, horror, and recognition. I’ve never met Schneiderman; I’ve never met the victims who allege his abuse. But I knew what these women were describing because I too have felt something like those slaps, those stings, that choking fear. I understood the disconnect between thinking you were dating a “woke” man, a guy who understood in his guts the inequity of being a woman in this patriarchal world, and finding that this man was a rank, abusive hypocrite.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Schneiderman glows with an idealized aura of the East Coast elite. After graduating from Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Schniederman worked as a public interest attorney before turning to public office. In 1998, Schneiderman ran for a New York Senate seat in New York’s 31st district, which at the time stretched from the Upper West Side through Washington Heights and into Riverdale in the Bronx. Schneiderman won that election. He won the next election. And he won four times more, eventually parlaying his state congressional successes into his winning 2010 bid for New York attorney general. By all public accounts, Schneiderman used his power and his privilege as a champion for women and for the poor. You couldn’t draw a better poster boy for American liberalism.

I think I voted for Schneiderman. Why would I not? I was a progressive Democrat, and Schneiderman looked like an exciting candidate. Supporting both women’s access to abortion and victims of domestic violence, Schneiderman’s record on women’s issues was strong. Indeed, as state senator, Schneiderman introduced and passed the Strangulation Prevention Act of 2010, a bill that specifically categorized choking as a criminal felony. In his nicely cut, nondescript suits and silver fox hair, Schneiderman embodied consummate “woke” manliness, a guy who can execute a decent jump shot, then effortlessly quash dickish locker-room talk.
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How to Stay Married After Your Baby is Born, or, I’m not Divorced Yet

CSA Images / Getty, Penguin Random House

Laura June | Now My Heart is Full | July 2018 | 12 minutes (3,056 words)

It’s incredibly weird to write a book about your child and not write about your marriage, when you’re definitely married. My daughter Zelda definitely has a dad, his name is Josh, and he’s my husband. He is absolutely not thirty-three Chihuahuas stacked in a trench coat. I assure you he is 100 percent real.

But I committed quite early, in the days of writing essays for public consumption about my life with my daughter, to not really saying anything about my marriage, simply because Josh, as a somewhat public person in his life as an editor and writer himself, never “signed up” for my project. He could have chosen to write about his experiences of fatherhood, but he didn’t. I’m sure his version would be much different than mine.

And there was something too dear and near to me in the thought of writing honestly about my relationship.

But also: I don’t remember that much of him in the first year. I have to try really hard to pull up memories of him sometimes, as if there was a finite amount of space inside me then for storing things.

I know this is more my failing than his absence. It was motherhood-induced myopia, where all I could or would see was myself and my daughter and the various threads that tied us back and forth to each other. It was selfishness personified, a biological reaction. Taking care of a child is so hard, so time consuming: it made sense that our emotions and needs would consume me and that in turn, three years later I would have a blank space for a lot of where Josh should be.

But also: I did spend much of my time with Zelda alone. The weekends were family time, and they were necessarily less stressful, simply because there were two sets of hands, two people to manage the packing up and the setting off. We were happy some days and miserable others. But most of the time he wasn’t physically around. He was just getting mean, panicked, desperate, or even angry texts from me. It’s not that he didn’t suffer the emotional drain that comes with first-time parenthood, but he did experience a lot of it only secondhand.

And even though I did decide to leave him out of my writing largely, I feel I need to say something. I owe it to myself to be honest about how awful that first part of it really was.
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Bridget Jones’s Staggeringly Outdated Diary

Miramax Films / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,918 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

I spent most of the ‘90s smoking and being a poseur, but in between packs of Gauloises I also read a lot, so long as it wasn’t the books that my teachers and professors assigned. My literature of choice was all about the same thing: cool contemporary adults wigging out about their relationships, a genre that would soon fall under the terms “chick lit” (see: Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996) and its somewhat lesser-known counterpart, “dick lit” (see: Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, 1995).

Bridget Jones was acid-tongued but also prone to disastrous pratfalls, just like me! And High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming was unambitious and antisocial, just like me! I loved these protagonists so much, in fact, that when I stood in front of a chagrined Hornby at a signing in New York and thrust out my dog-eared copy of his book, I proclaimed that it had “helped me through some very difficult times,” and then I smoked a cigarette indoors, and everyone seemed pleased, especially me. In revisiting these tomes of my youth as an aging poseur, I’ve had both a not-insubstantial craving for nicotine and a series of horrifying revelations. Namely, these books — despite their cool Gen-X setting, cool Gen-X props (cigarettes), and cool Gen-X openness about failure — are some inveterate Baby Boomer bullshit.

Reader, if you think I’m aiming to incite a Quarrel of the Ancients and the Even More Ancients, you are correct. These cool Gen-X novels, written by people born in 1958 (Fielding) and 1957 (Hornby), are basically different iterations of a familiar Boomer trope. It’s the same romantic wish fulfillment — the uncomplicated, largely imaginary, white-bourgeois heterosexual sort — you find in the offensive and pre-antiquated self-help bestsellers of the same decade, namely The Rules (Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, 1995) and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (John Gray, 1992).

Whereas the Gen-X motto of whatever encapsulated the extent of our desire to mitigate other people’s love lives and often our own, our elders — unencumbered by slackitude; seemingly aghast at our normalization of casual sex — saw in us a deep and aching need for what the Germans call das Happyend. Romantic fatalists of the ‘90s needn’t worry, you guys! For every (white, bourgeois, heterosexual) romantic problem that appeared in our midst and on our bestseller lists, there was a corresponding solution straight outta Levittown.

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Mind the Dog’s Feet

Associated Press, Cam Barker / Getty, Themba Hadebe / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chibundu Onuzo | Longreads | July 2018 | 17 minutes (4,340 words)

 

The invitation was for a literary festival in Durban. I had never heard of Durban. Only Johannesburg and Cape Town, but I knew South Africa like I knew my grandfather who died before I was born. If he walked into a room, I would recognize his voice and the cut of his suit from the stories my mother had told me.

I knew Mandela for the icon that he was. His image dangling from a leather chain. Mandela on a flag, fluttering. Mandela on a T-shirt, stretched across two pectorals. The man smiled and his eyes disappeared behind the smile. His teeth looked strong. Twenty-seven years without a dentist. A miracle.

I knew something of the struggle against apartheid. Growing up, our video collection was small. We watched Sarafina and Sister Act 2 until the images were blurred by gray static. Whoopi Goldberg played the lead in both movies, cast twice as an inspirational teacher. Sarafina was grimmer than the second Sister Act but only by a few shades. An African township versus an American inner city. Either way, almost everyone was musical and black.

I knew a few South Africans. After I’d moved to England, I met them in London. They were young, white, healthy, educated, and in exile from black South Africa. They couldn’t get jobs in their country. They couldn’t get the jobs they felt they deserved. For some, scions of wealthy land-owning or mine-owning families, their stay in England was to gain “international exposure” in a multinational company, to mark time before they took over the family business. For others, their exile was permanent. There was no place for them in a South Africa, where they would no longer automatically be at the front of the queue. Any bad news from home was met with a sort of schadenfreude. It was proof that they had been right to leave. The country was going to the dogs under black rule.

I was hostile when I met these white South Africans. It wasn’t my land, but it was my struggle, as it was the struggle of the thousands of black Africans who had donated financially to the anti-apartheid cause. The grievance was ours.

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If You Think Billy Joel Will Never Write Another Song, You May Be Right

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 18: Billy Joel performs on stage during his 100th Lifetime Performance at Madison Square Garden on July 18, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Myrna M. Suarez/WireImage)

At Vulture, Billy Joel talks to David Marchese about performing in his late 60s, why he stopped writing songs, the problems inherent in not owning your own recordings, and his opinion on the state of America today.

Those other guys still write songs. You don’t. What does that say about your relationship to making music compared to theirs?
Like I said, I couldn’t be as good as I wanted to be. I was always trying to feel like there was a real progression in my work, and eventually I realized I was only going to be X good. Because of that I knew I was going to beat myself up for not being better. So I stopped. That’s it.

You knew you were done 25 years ago?
I suppose inherently. The last song on River of Dreams is “Famous Last Words.” I’d realized that if a song wasn’t a hit single it didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to go in that direction. And look, it’s one thing if you own your recordings. I don’t. There was supposed to be a reversal of copyright back to me in 2013. Well, the record company dug in and got their battery of lawyers and we never got the stuff back. So I still don’t own my recordings. People wonder why there’ve been so many Billy Joel live albums and compilations. They’re not my idea. The record company owns all these recordings and can package them any way they want. As far as I’m concerned, I did 12 studio albums. The live crap and all these compilations — they don’t mean anything.

What resonance does a song like “Piano Man,” which you’ve sung thousands of times, have for you?
It’s like a kid: Sometimes it pisses me off, but I always love it — I wrote the thing, you know? I do think “Piano Man” could’ve been better. There’s quirky things — people think, what a cheap rhyme: Davy in the Navy. I’m sorry: The guy’s name was Davy! There was actually Paul, in real estate, and the guy was writing a novel. I used the real peoples’ names in the song. I suppose it’s hard for some people to believe that.

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Arizona’s Aquifers Are a Laboratory of Our Dry Future

AP Photo/Matt York,File

You might not have heard of the Sulphur Springs Valley, but in this remote cover of southeastern Arizona, the entire world’s pending water crisis is being played out.

For The New York Times Magazine, Noah Gallagher Shannon reports on how lax water regulations and under-utilized land have created a gold-rush mentality that is draining the desert valley’s ancient aquifer. Big corporate farmers moved in to capitalize on the nut-growing craze. There are no streams or reservoirs here. Life depends on the aquifer, and as the big farms drain it, homeowners’ wells and smaller farms’ wells have gone dry. Although huge farms can afford to drill deeper for water, residents who need the water to bathe and drink can’t afford to drill deeper. And smaller farmers can’t compete either. But in the end, everyone loses when the aquifer goes dry. And it will. For a sense of scale, Shannon writes that “In 2017 alone, one farm pumped 22 billion gallons, nearly double the volume of bottled water sold in the United States annually.”

Arizona was particularly attractive to Middle Eastern farmers. A policy of unregulated pumping on the Arabian Peninsula had, in 40 years, drained aquifers that had taken 20,000 years to form, leaving thousands of acres fallow and forcing Saudi Arabia and others to outsource much of their agricultural production. In 2014, a Saudi Arabian-owned company, the Almarai Corporation, bought 10,000 acres in the town of Vicksburg, northwest of Sulphur Springs Valley, planting alfalfa to ship halfway around the world to feed Saudi cattle. Then, a United Arab Emirates farming corporation, Al Dahra, bought several thousand-acre farms along both sides of the Arizona-California border. These purchases were perfectly legal, but many residents felt these newcomers were essentially “exporting water.” At least once, the Sheriff’s Department in Vicksburg deployed five deputies to stand guard at a town-hall meeting.

With less rain and snow reaching the desert floor, overpumping has rendered a semi-renewable resource finite, touching off the kind of resource war perhaps more familiar to coal camps and oil boomtowns. Hydrogeologists use the phrase “groundwater mining” to describe situations in which the rate of water withdrawal exceeds the rate of replenishment. For some, the metaphor offers a stark lesson. “If we know we’re mining the water, let’s just say it,” said Richard Searle, when I visited at his ranch outside Willcox. At 63, Searle still cuts a frontiersman’s profile; a cutting-horse competitor and former bank manager, he is descended from a prominent ranching family and formerly served as county supervisor. Part of the reason groundwater mining in the valley hadn’t forced a reckoning earlier, he said, was that water was ubiquitous to the point of being invisible. Local farmers were never required to put meters on their wells, he pointed out, which meant that nobody knew exactly how much water was being pumped, much less how much was left. “Long term, people say we should search for a solution,” he said, “but they don’t want to be the ones to suffer.”

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